# DAH-Net: A Dual-Attention Hybrid Network for Interpretable and Robust EEG-Based Emotion Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06411 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06411/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [EEG-Based Emotion Recognition Using Regularized Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07835/) (2019)
- [Transfer Learning for EEG-Based Brain-Computer Interfaces: A Review of Progress Made Since 2016](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06286/) (2020)
- [Learning Representations from EEG with Deep Recurrent-Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06448/) (2015)

## Abstract (arXiv)

EEG-based emotion recognition supports affective brain-computer interfaces and mental health monitoring yet remains challenged by signal complexity, subject variability, and limited interpretability. We propose DAH-Net, a dual-attention hybrid network integrating 1D-CNN, BiLSTM, and dual multi-head attention (16+8 heads) for three-class EEG emotion classification. Evaluated on 2,479 samples with 988 EEG features, DAH-Net achieves 99.19% held-out test accuracy with a 0.81% train-test gap, outperforming RF (96.17%), SVM (96.77%), MLP (97.18%), and Transformer (98.19%) baselines. Friedman testing (chi2 = 28.54, p < 0.001) and post-hoc Wilcoxon comparisons confirm statistical significance. Feature-level analysis using Random Forest importance, SHAP attribution, and feature category isolation shows that covariance features achieve near-baseline standalone accuracy (94.96%), while eigenvalue features show limited standalone performance (84.07%) but provide compact complementary information. The compact architecture (3.33M parameters, approximately 13.3MB using 32-bit weights) suggests potential for future lightweight EEG-based affective computing, pending subject-independent and external validation.